‘I need to see what’s in that letter,’ she said to the woman holding the door open.
The woman smiled sympathetically, her blue eyes crinkling with regret as she told Kate that she’d have to wait until it had been dusted for fingerprints. Kate took a step back and watched as the boot was opened to reveal a suitcase. After taking photographs, one of the team lifted it up to examine the rest of the boot but, apart from an unused spare wheel, it was empty.
‘Can I have a look in the suitcase?’ Kate asked.
The forensics officer frowned before handing her a pair of nitrile gloves.
‘Give me a second,’ he said before raising the camera and firing off a series of shots of the suitcase in situ, the camera clicking in rapid motion like a professional photo shoot.
Kate waited until he’d finished and then leaned into the boot.
The suitcase was red and soft-sided with a zip fastening that ran around three sides. There were attachments on the slider for a padlock but Caroline didn’t appear to have been especially worried about the security of her belongings as she hadn’t bothered to lock the case. Kate undid the zip and pushed back the lid, leaving the suitcase gaping like an open mouth in the boot of the car.
She called Hollis over to witness her examination of the contents and he peered over her shoulder as she carefully peeled back layers of jumpers, trousers and blouses, each one recorded by a series of camera flashes. A pair of black leather shoes and a pair of brilliant white, obviously new, trainers lay at the bottom.
‘No laptop,’ Hollis observed.
Kate undid the strings of a toiletries bag: deodorant, soap, miniature shampoo and conditioner, lipstick, toothbrush and toothpaste. Everything looked like it had been bought recently for a holiday or a trip.
‘Why would she bother to pack a bag if she was intending to drive up here and kill herself?’ Hollis mused.
It was a valid question and one to which Kate had no answer.
‘Maybe she wasn’t sure,’ Hollis continued. ‘She might have just decided to run away, to disappear. Or she might have been worried that she couldn’t go through with it.’
Kate wasn’t convinced. She’d not dealt with many suicides during her career but she’d never heard of anybody having a contingency plan in case they bottled out. Suicide was so final; such a clear end to the difficulties that a person might be facing.
‘Dan, how did you know that she hadn’t just gone out for a couple of hours this morning?’
Hollis’s brow furrowed in concentration as if trying to remember the sequence of events which had alerted him to Caroline Lambert’s absence.
‘The neighbour,’ he said. ‘One of her neighbours from further down the road had seen her putting a suitcase in the car as he walked past with his dog. He said that she seemed to be struggling with it and he’d asked if she needed a hand. That would have been early this morning.’
Kate tried to picture the scene. The drive of the house was enclosed by chest-high gates and the garden was surrounded by shrubs. It would have been easy for Caroline to have loaded up her car without being seen. Unless she’d wanted the neighbour to see the suitcase, and seeing her struggling with it would have made the contact all the more memorable.
‘I think this is a set-up,’ Kate said to Hollis. ‘She wanted us to know that she’d done a runner and she wanted us to find her car. I bet she’s on CCTV somewhere from the A1 to here – she’ll have picked a route where there’s likely to be a camera.’
‘So you don’t think she killed herself?’ Hollis asked, glancing towards the clifftop.
‘Honestly? I have no idea. We need to see what’s in the envelope that she left.’
‘I think the SOCOs have finished with it,’ Hollis said, glancing round the side of the car. Kate strode back to the passenger door and tapped one of the overall-clad figures on the shoulder. The woman turned around and her eyes briefly blazed with irritation.
‘Envelope,’ Kate said. ‘I need to see what’s inside.’
Wordlessly, the woman leaned down and picked up the white rectangle. She passed it to Kate and reached down to remove a scalpel from the foam padding of her crime scene case. ‘Use this,’ the woman said, holding it out handle first.
Kate inserted the tip of the blade in the gap where the flap was folded over. A flash made her blink as the SOCO took a photograph. She eased the scalpel along the top of the envelope. A single piece of paper lay folded inside.
Watched closely by Hollis and the forensics officer, she slid the paper out and unfolded it.
Two words were written across the middle in black block capitals.
‘What the hell?’ Hollis whispered.
28
‘Thanks for coming in so early,’ Kate addressed her team as they gathered in the meeting room at Doncaster Central, all nursing mugs of hot drinks that she’d provided from the canteen. ‘As you know, Caroline Lambert is officially missing. We have no idea whether she has taken her own life or whether she abandoned her car at Flamborough Head and has absconded. A local lifeboat crew will search the area around and below the cliffs today but they’re not hopeful as, according to the car park CCTV, Caroline arrived a few minutes before a high winter tide.’
‘Convenient,’ mumbled O’Connor, taking a swig of his cappuccino and wiping milk foam from his moustache with the back of his hand.
For once, Kate was inclined to agree with him. ‘Sam, can you show us the footage?’
Cooper turned on the projector and tapped a series of keys on her laptop. The screen was filled with a black-and-white, still image of the car park at Flamborough Head with the lighthouse and the path to the cliffs barely visible in the top right-hand corner.
‘Lambert pulls in at just after one pm,’ Sam said, hitting ‘play’. ‘The dark saloon car is her BMW.’ She continued to narrate as the others watched the car pass through the public parking area and pull up into one of the ‘reserved’ spaces close to the lighthouse. The clock in the corner of the image continued to count the seconds but there was no movement from the car for nearly three minutes. Finally, the driver’s side door opened and a figure stepped out.
Even though she’d already viewed the footage, Kate was still surprised by how clearly recognisable Caroline Lambert was as she stood next to the car looking up at the lighthouse.
At 1.09, Caroline checked her watch, held out her hand towards the car, presumably using the key to activate the central locking, and set off towards the cliff path.
‘That’s all we’ve got,’ Cooper said. ‘I’ve already been through the footage from earlier to check the number plates of any other cars parked in the vicinity. There were only three – East Yorks should be checking out the owners as we speak to see if they saw Caroline Lambert near the cliff edge.’
‘Hope they’ve not sent Morrison,’ Hollis whispered to Kate with a grin. ‘Might be a quite a wait if they did.’
Kate smiled back at him. They’d had a long drive back from Flamborough the previous evening. Snow had hit parts of the A1 and slowed traffic to a crawl. It had given them time to mull over the meaning of the note left in the car but they had more possibilities than answers, which was why Kate wanted to share it with her team and get them brainstorming.
‘Thanks for that, Sam,’ Kate said, nudging Cooper out of the way and navigating to a different programme on the laptop. ‘It’s possible that this was staged.’
‘How do you mean?’ Barratt asked, looking annoyed. He’d spent the previous afternoon involved in the fruitless search of Caroline Lambert’s house which appeared to have left him in an unusually belligerent mood. ‘Surely this winds everything up. If she’s dead then we can’t arrest her for the murders of Maddie Cox or her dad. She probably knew she’d go to jail for a long time and couldn’t face it. It’s not like there’s anybody waiting for her to get out.’
‘It just seems incredibly convenient. A neighbour saw her leaving with a suitcase so we knew that she hadn’t just popped to the shops. She
arrived at Flamborough at high tide and it was one of the highest of the season. She’s extremely visible in the CCTV, almost as if she chose that parking space so that she could be seen in the footage.’
O’Connor was nodding. ‘So she disappears. No charges to face because she’s supposedly dead while she sets herself up with another identity, another life. It’s possible if she had enough money. Or influential friends.’
‘She’s got plenty of money,’ Kate said. ‘We need to get onto her bank and try to find out if she was paying into other accounts in other names. She might have stashed away thousands somewhere.’
‘Fake ID, change of appearance, and she’s good to go,’ O’Connor continued. ‘Easy enough if you know the right people. Speaking of which, I found out that Maddie Cox did owe money to one of the usual scumbags. Terry Dawlish reckons she borrowed ten K from him to pay off some gambling debts. Paid it all back with interest in one lump sum last month. Looks like she did have a bit of help from Caroline Lambert.’
Kate had forgotten that she’d asked O’Connor to dig around in Maddie’s finances. It hardly felt important considering the other links between the two women but it was useful to have further confirmation of the relationship. O’Connor had done a good job and Kate had another one for him.
‘Steve, you seem to have a good idea what it would take to change your identity and disappear. Get out there and see if anybody might have supplied Caroline with fake ID. If she acquired it in South Yorkshire, somebody will know somebody who knows who supplied it.’
O’Connor gave her a mock salute and turned to leave.
‘Not yet. I need you all to see this.’
Kate projected an image of the note that she’d removed from the car onto the whiteboard. The two words had been etched onto the inside of her eyelids as she’d settled down to sleep and they’d still been there when she’d woken a few hours later.
Find Jeanette
‘What does that mean?’ Barratt asked. Kate didn’t answer, waiting for a response from another member of the team.
‘Jeanette was her sister,’ Cooper said. ‘She went missing in 1986. She’d been out with friends one evening in August and never came home. Parents reported her missing; there was an investigation, a newspaper appeal but no sign of her. I reviewed some of the case notes yesterday but there’s nothing there. The investigating team didn’t manage to come up with a viable line of enquiry and there was no sign of abduction or that the girl had been murdered. She was last seen at just after midnight on the seventeenth of August 1986 by a girl called Julie Atkins, a school friend. I’m trying to track her down to see if she can add anything to her original statement but, as it’s over thirty years ago, I’m not hopeful.’
Barratt still wasn’t satisfied.
‘But what does she mean by “Find Jeanette”. Does she expect us to reopen the investigation? How does she expect us to find her now if the police failed in the eighties? It’s not like any new information has come to light.’
Kate looked round the room. Each member of her team seemed lost in thought, trying to make sense of the message. They were an intuitive bunch and had good instincts but she could see that they were all struggling with this one. ‘What’s changed?’ she prompted. ‘Why now?’
‘Her dad’s dead?’ O’Connor suggested. ‘And her mum. They were both alive when the girl went missing.’
‘What difference does that make?’ Cooper asked.
‘It must be linked with Dennis Lambert’s death. That’s the catalyst,’ Hollis said, just as he’d argued on the way back from Flamborough the previous night. ‘That’s changed something for Caroline. Somehow it’s made her think that we might be able to find her sister.’
Kate turned to Cooper. ‘Was there any suggestion in the original file that Lambert was a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance?’
‘No. Nothing. Both parents were interviewed extensively, together and separately. There was nothing to raise suspicion as far as I can tell. They put posters up around the estate for a couple of years afterwards, probably hoping that somebody, somewhere might have information.’
‘And Caroline?’
‘She was nine. A female officer spoke to her and made notes but the child was upset and didn’t really add anything to what they already knew.’
‘Was the house searched?’
‘As far as I can tell they checked the house and the garden – including the shed. There’s no suggestion that there was anything to contradict the family’s story. There were a few reported sightings of Jeanette in the months after her disappearance but none of them could be confirmed and, to be honest, we expect that. The public have seen an appeal for a missing kid and suddenly he or she’s in every shopping centre and on every train for a few weeks.’
‘Easy enough to hide a body, though,’ O’Connor observed. ‘Especially a kid. Loft space, under floorboards, under a flowerbed, behind a bath panel. If it’s only for a few days you could probably get away with it if you wrap it up well enough.’
The others nodded thoughtfully.
‘And Lambert re-landscaped the garden soon after. New flowerbeds and a greenhouse according to Brenda Powley,’ Hollis added.
It was possible, Kate had to concede. If Jeanette had died or been killed in the house, her body could have been hidden until the main thrust of the investigation died down and then a more permanent resting place could have been found. But they had no cause to suspect Lambert or his wife and, according to Brenda Powley, Lambert should have been a candidate for beatification after he died.
‘We need to look at Lambert,’ Kate decided. ‘If Caroline did kill him she must have had a reason beyond putting him out of his misery. Kailisa says he was kept drugged and probably in pain for the last couple of weeks of his life. That smacks of torture to me and you don’t do that to somebody unless you want something. Either information or revenge.’
‘You think she might have been torturing her father to find out what he did to her sister?’ Barratt asked.
Kate shrugged. ‘I have no idea what went on in that house but I’m convinced that it’s much more complicated than a mercy killing. I also think Maddie Cox was collateral damage. I suspect that Caroline manipulated her by offering her money to pay off her debts and then something happened between the two women that led Caroline to lash out and kill Maddie. She may have been protecting herself – the nurse might have been supplying drugs illegally and could have threatened to go to the police. She might have put her career on the line in some way and wanted to come clean. I doubt we’ll ever know.’
Silence as the team considered Kate’s words.
‘Right. We need to get to work,’ she continued. ‘O’Connor – fake ID. Barratt, I want you to go back to the Crosslands Estate and ask about Dennis Lambert. What was he like? Was he a violent man? Did he love his kids? Get an impression that doesn’t involve anything that Brenda Powley has to say.’
O’Connor and Barratt scooted off on their separate jobs.
‘Sam. Find Julie Atkins. I want to talk to her. If anybody knew what sort of relationship Jeanette Lambert had with her family it would have been her closest friend.’
Cooper closed the lid of the laptop, slipped it under her arm, and left the room, heading for her own desk and her own PC where she could mine for information uninterrupted.
‘Dan. You and me on the phones. Get onto East Yorkshire, see if they’ve had any luck with the owners of the cars that were parked up at Flamborough yesterday. If not, get the numbers and ring yourself. I’m going to do some digging into Caroline Lambert’s background, starting with her previous job in Plymouth. We have no clue what this woman was really like but there might be somebody down there who can help us.’
Two frustrating hours later and Kate hung up the phone with a loud sigh. She’d spoken to Caroline’s boss and three of her colleagues, two at length, and nobody had a bad word to say about their former workmate. She was punctual, polite, well-motivated according to the boss,
and the others described her as considerate, quiet and extremely competent. They knew very little about her background. Two knew that she was from ‘up north somewhere’ and one thought she might have been from Yorkshire. The only piece of information that was of any interest was that Caroline had told two of her colleagues that she was an orphan and an only child but another remembered her mentioning a sister.
‘Got anything, Dan?’ Kate said to Hollis who had just hung up his own phone in a similar manner. He shook his head.
‘East Yorks hadn’t got round to it so they gave me the phone numbers. Dog walkers and bird watchers. Nobody noticed Caroline park up and nobody remembers seeing her on the cliff path.’
‘Any luck with Julie Atkins?’ Kate asked Cooper who was still immersed in her virtual world. She looked up, eyes not quite focussed and nodded.
‘I’ve managed to find her on Facebook. She’s married but still uses her maiden name as part of her Facebook name. She’s Julie Wilkinson now. I’ve just done an electoral roll search and she lives in Rotherham, near the General Hospital.’ Cooper scrawled the details onto a Post-it and passed them to Kate.
‘Got her phone number as well. Only the home one, though. Her mobile would take a lot longer.’
Kate smiled. It was as close as Cooper ever came to an admission of defeat. She always believed that the information she wanted was available if she had enough time to find it.
‘I think we’d be better heading round there,’ Kate said. ‘If I ring first it might give her time to filter her memories. I want to see her reaction when I ask her about Jeanette and her father.’ Kate checked her watch. The chances of Julie being home mid-morning were remote but it was worth a try.
‘Dan,’ she called. ‘Grab your coat, you’ve pulled.’
He grinned over at her.
‘You wish.’
29
Merciless: a gripping detective thriller (DI Kate Fletcher Book 2) Page 21
